The Dialectics of Narcissus and Icarus

Mariola Jankun-Dopartowa

Abstract

The text is an excerpt from a chapter from Mariola Jankun-Dopartowa’s book Gorzkie kino Agnieszki Holland [Agnieszka Holland’s Bitter Cinema], to be published by Słowo/Obraz Terytoria publishing house. Jankun-Dopartowa analyzes Agnieszka Holland’s film Total Eclipse in a broader context of the modernist literary tradition. In line with the tradition, Rimbaud personified rebellion against rotten bourgeoisie morals and ossified traditional art. Nothing is clear-cut in Holland’s film. She does not accurately stick to historical facts. She rather shows the successive stereotypes of the artist just to question them. Jankun-Dopartowa terms the aesthetics of the film as kitsch, a reference to the terminology proposed by Milan Kundera who regarded kitsch as one of the major artistic categories of the 20^th century. We see Rimbaud the way he was perceived by his circle of friends, lover Verlaine, his sister, Verlaine’s wife and others. But nobody was able to cross the line of terrible loneliness of the artist and reach the truth about him. These successive stereotypes clash with the film reality created in the fashion of the vision born in Rimbaud’s poems. As a result, we deal not with the biography of an artist but with the portrait of narcissistic culture able only to trivialize the complex reality.